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Friday, February 3, 2012

Exam Marks

Chemistry: 91/95 (95.8%)
I got half to one mark off here and there, due to my lack of attention to details. As a result, I didn't get the 97.4% (92.5/95) that would get me my maximum final mark.

In any case, a 95.8% got me my second highest possible mark, so I am not feeling too disappointed.

Math: 88/89 (98.9%)
I don't know what I should do to myself for not knowing that an obtuse angle cannot be greater than 180°. Because of this lack of knowledge, I got a communication question wrong. :(

But fortunately, this was the only mark that I lost, and I got my maximum final mark with my exam.

Physics: 97.5/100 (97.5%)
I lost one mark for a knowledge question: Faraday used an iron ring— not a copper one— for his experiment.

Another 1.5 marks were lost for careless mistakes such as forgetting to put the direction for acceleration...

And finally, I messed up one step of a kinetics problem when finding the average velocity— I forgot that the person had an initial velocity of twelve, not zero. This costed me one mark.

Wait... I lost a total of 3.5 marks, so how come I am still at a 97.5? Well, the teacher dropped the denominator for no apparent reason (except to be generous and make the denominator a perfect 100). And this actually increased my final mark by one percent (yay).

English: 38/45 (84.4%)
This is my worst ever English exam mark (I got 90% in both my previous English exams). I guess this is because that as opposed to my grade nine and ten exams, there was no longer any questions where you could get full marks just by writing a single sentence that contains the answer.

Instead, you had to write at least one paragraph for each of the questions so that you could "properly" support your answer (and that's why my exam had 12 pages, double the length of my previous English exams). And as my answers probably weren't detailed or in depth enough, I lost half a mark to one mark in a lot of the questions.

However, an 84% isn't too bad if compared to the rest of the class, since a lot of my classmates got something like 78%.

By the way, the English exam is only worth 15%, half of all my other exams. So it's significantly less important...

(Note to future self: the essay topic was to discuss the internal conflicts that the main characters in Macbeth and The Picture of Dorian Gray have, and how these conflicts serve to give the texts meanings. For Macbeth, I wrote about his conflict between his morals and his ambition. For Dorian, I wrote about his (eternal) beauty and his soul. Considering how weak my points for Dorian were, it is surprising that I still got a 12.5 out of 15)

Overall
I am still slightly regretting that for my most important course (grade 12 chemistry), I didn't get a mark high enough to give me my maximum final mark.

However, besides that, I am quite content with everything. My marks for my math and physics exams were both the highest in the respective classes, and my English exam was satisfactory, since 84% was probably close the maximum that I could get anyways. (Given the time parameters, I couldn't have possibly made any of my answers more elaborate).